Last week it ‘leaked’ to the world that Chris Moyles had signed an extension to his contract with the BBC, and one assumes Radio 1, and one assumes the Breakfast show. The contract, we are told, runs until 2014, and sees him up to the 10 year anniversary of taking over the Radio 1 breakfast show, certainly outstripping everybody else who has held down the breakfast show before him, and setting the benchmark so high for whoever comes after him.
Indeed, Moyles will be 40 when the current contract ends. Is a 40 year old too old for Radio 1? That’s a good question and there are two distinctly different ways of looking at who should be on Radio 1.
It is fair to say that the target audience of pre-teens to late 20s / possibly very early 30s, should identify with the presenters. Can a 40 year old really talk about stuff that ‘kids’ are talking about? Well, yes. And no.
Radio 1 is split into two distinct halves. There’s ‘specialist’ which goes out during evenings and overnight, and ‘mainstream’ which goes out during the daytime. In a clever way, ‘mainstream’ is a sort of sampler for the more specialist programming.
Now, if a specialist music presenter certainly knows their music, like Pete Tong does, the fact that he’s over 50 doesn’t seem to concern those he plays it for. Likewise Annie Nightingale who’ll be 70 next year. She can still bang out the choons when it comes to breaks and beats, so why not?
Daytime, however, is more about the personality of the presenter rather than the personality of the music. It would be very hard for a 70 year old to actually identify with the target daytime audience and vice versa. Therefore it is fair to say that ‘age’ is important. You just can’t have old people on daytime Radio 1, which is why the ‘youngsters’ such as Fearne Cotton and Greg James are identifiable as in touch with their target demographic listeners, whilst daytime wouldn’t suite Pete Tong or Annie Nightingale.
Meanwhile, Scott Mills and Chris Moyles, both being the same age, have had to work on it to keep ‘in touch’. Mills has managed to produce a sound that appeals to the student population (once ‘owned’ by Annie Nightingale in the 1970s/1980s) with antics and features that they obviously appreciate, whilst Moyles holds court to a collection of studio based characters that almost sound like an older family of brothers and sisters, and yet produce radio that can appeal across different ages. Somehow.
The blur between what should be proper to Radio 2 rather than Radio 1 shows in the subjects under conversation sometimes. Take ‘Take That’ for example. They quite rightly feature very heavily on Radio 2’s playlist and as studio guests, and yet they will also be discussed and championed by Moyles and his team on Radio 1, for whom the target audience will probably see Take That as being something their mum and dad like.
At the same time, Moyles will happily make a joke out of not liking or understanding the modern day music and changing styles. Again, it’s a little bit like somebody’s dad moaning about a teenager’s musical choice and saying it’s all rubbish and ‘not like it was in my day’. Why would a teenager want to listen to this when radio should be an opportunity to escape from what they might hear from their parents?
Well, that’s the problem.
So, I can only guess that a teenager listening to Moyles can listen alongside a parent and there’s a little bit of something there for either of them, and it works. Will he be able to keep that up in his 40s?
Two years is a long way away. If Moyles is keeping the breakfast show for that duration, then good for him and good for me. I, as a, ahem, 19 year old, very much enjoy his show.
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